Keywords

Introduction

When the concept of global governance emerged in the 1990s, it met with great enthusiasm from feminist IR scholarship throughout the world. The notion of global governance indicates a shift from state-centered government to network-oriented modes of cooperation “at the global stage” (Neumann and Sending 2010: 1; Rai 2004) to tackle the economic, social, and environmental challenges posed by globalization in the post-Cold War era. This shift in international politics concomitantly promoted conceptual changes in the study of international relations bolstering constructivist claims within IR. This has provided a “fertile ground for feminist research” (Prügl 1996: 15), as many feminist IR scholars, in a constructivist vein, aim at decentering political authority by investigating the important role of non-state actors and the normative underpinnings of agency and, thus, illustrating the permeability and malleability of institutional settings within global governance.

When reviewing this rich body of feminist literature, the question arises, what the specificity about feminist IR scholarship emanating from Europe actually is? This chapter uses a close reading of feminist IR scholarship in Europe to answer this question, identifying conceptual and theoretical commonalities. As a result, this chapter shows, that on the one hand, feminist IR scholarship in Europe is closely connected to feminist IR worldwide as it seeks to analyze transnational feminist networks’ mobilization and framing strategies, and their role in the diffusion of gender equality norms both at international and local levels and the strategies for implementing gender equality in international organizations. On the other hand, this chapter argues, feminist scholarship in Europe has made an original and essential contribution to feminist IR scholarship on a conceptual level, namely by applying feminist state theory to the analysis of global governance and by theorizing the role of knowledge and expertise as technologies of power. The argument put forth in this chapter is, in a nutshell: feminist IR scholarship in Europe moves beyond constructivist perspectives by productively linking neo-Marxist and Foucauldian schools of thought. While there are of course a few feminist IR scholars based in other parts of the world that do so, there is a cluster of such scholarship coming out of Europe.

The aim of this chapter is, first, to give an overview of the broader feminist global governance literature, second, to situate feminist writings in Europe within this literature and, third, to depict the ways in which feminist IR scholars in Europe employ feminist materialist and discourse theoretical (re-)conceptualizations of the state for revealing gendered power dynamics in global governance. As this chapters shows, this scholarship evolved specifically from neo-Marxist and Foucauldian traditions of political thought, that is peculiar to some political science departments in both, Germany and Great Britain.

Overview: Feminist Analyses of Global Governance

Since the end of the 1990s, a burgeoning body of feminist literature has emerged, critically examining the study of global governance and international organizations. This literature can roughly be divided into four areas of investigation (Meyer and Prügl 1999; Rai 2004; Çağlar et al. 2013): (1) actor-centered accounts; (2) norms-centered analyses; (3) institution-centered accounts; and (4) international political economy (IPE)-centered analyses.

First, actor-centered accounts focus at women’s organizing and coalition building across global and local spaces. This body of literature deals with the engagements of feminist actors both from within and outside of international institutions (e.g. Williams 2013; Schultz 2006; Joachim 2003; Liebowitz 2002). Mostly drawing on social movements theory, these studies identify the characteristic features of transnational organizing and networking among different groups of feminist actors (activists, bureaucrats, and expert) and examine their mobilization and framing strategies and, thereby, assess the extent to which these actors are able to navigate institutional settings that are not necessarily favorable to gender equality policies (as for instance in the context of international and regional trade agreements; see Williams 2013; True 2008; Liebowitz 2002). These studies provide a wealth of insights on how feminist actors have successfully shaped institutional and procedural settings and have changed the policy agenda within global governance structures. But they also reveal constraints, such as low funding and structural dependencies, political obstacles and institutional hurdles, that impede feminist actors’ transnational mobilization and advocacy work (e.g. Joachim 2003; Sperling et al. 2001; Lipovskaya 2002). Such kinds of barriers are often traced back either to individuals (such as politicians or bureaucrats within international institutions, and their unwillingness to support the idea of gender equality) or more broadly to patriarchal structures and the dominance of the male gaze in the political sphere. A conceptual critique of the gendered constitution of global governance is principally indicated, yet, not spelled out. Thus, these studies tend to overemphasize the successes or “triumphalism” (Baksh and Harcourt 2015: 12) of feminist interventions in global governance.

Second, norm-centered analyses of global governance interrogate the relations, processes and mechanisms through which women’s human rights norms or gender equality norms, respectively, diffuse around the globe (e.g. Engberg-Pedersen et al. 2019; Zwingel 2016; Levitt et al. 2013; Towns 2010; Wölte 2008). Some studies point to the important role of the inner dynamics in international organizations for the adoption and institutionalization of gender equality norms (e.g. Fejerskov and Cold-Ravnkilde 2019); others elaborate on what happens when international norms hit the ground of a specific normative context at regional, national, or local level (e.g. Towns 2010; Zwingel 2016; Joachim and Schneiker 2012; Wölte 2008). Most notably, this scholarship fundamentally rejects conceptualizations of international norms as universally given and as essentially good. Employing a context-specific and “situated approach” (Engberg-Pedersen et al. 2019), feminist norm scholars predominantly examine the many distinct ways of norm diffusion and translation at the local level. They markedly illustrate how the meanings of norms are negotiated, (re)interpreted, and fixed (e.g. Levitt et al. 2013; Sabat 2013; Joachim and Schneiker 2012) and which new hierarchies are (re)produced (e.g. Towns 2012: 189).

Third, institution-centered accounts of the literature put institutional strategies, such as gender mainstreaming, gender budgeting, and the “establishment of gender expertise” (Kunz et al. 2019: 24) in international and regional organizations at the center (e.g. Arora-Jonsson and Sijapati Basnett 2018; Davids et al. 2014; Çağlar 2013a; Moser and Moser 2005; Wöhl 2008). Broadly speaking, this scholarship interrogates “how gender gets written in or not in organizational texts and in what ways” (Arora-Jonsson and Sijapati Basnett 2018: 310). Taking a rather critical stance toward institutional strategies like gender mainstreaming, these scholars question the transformative potential of such strategies (cf. Çağlar 2013b). Certainly, all the studies acknowledge the positive impact of gender mainstreaming, at least insofar as international and regional organizations integrated gender equality concerns in a number of issue areas. However, providing theoretical reflections on the notion of change, some scholars “revaluate gender mainstreaming in terms of a slow revolution” (Davids et al. 2014: 397) or incremental change (Çağlar 2013a: 256). Interestingly, studies dealing with institutional strategies have brought about debates that urge for theoretical reconsiderations in regard to the structural, normative, and disciplinary underpinnings of global governance. As will be elaborated below, these studies conceptualize institutional strategies as technologies of power that constitute and shape subjectivities across global and local spaces (Mukhopadhyay and Prügl 2019; Bedford 2008).

Finally, feminist IPE-centered perspective also contributes to the critical engagements with global governance; dealing with the changing state/market-relations in the global economy, this scholarship investigates the interplay between neoliberal restructuring and global governance (e.g. Rai 2004; Waylen 2004, 2021; Wöhl 2008). Predominantly drawing on neo-Marxist and neo-Gramscian approaches in IPE, these scholars do not entirely discard the role of the state in global governance, but argue that the state’s role is still important as “capital needs the regulatory power of the state in order to do business” (Rai 2004: 585). Thus, they do not assume the “demise” (ibid.) but the “internationalization” (ibid.; cf. Sauer and Wöhl 2011) of the (gendered) state in the course of globalization. Feminist scholars of this camp, thus, analyze the gendered power relations within state institutions that constitute global governance.

As we can see, feminist IR scholars in Europe engage in each of the above presented strands of the literature, and it seems to be difficult to figure out the specifically “European” character of these debates. Yet, a close reading of the literature reveals that feminist scholars located in Europe, indeed, make a unique, conceptual contribution to the analysis global governance. Starting from the critique of a rather descriptive understanding of (global) governance in the mainstream literature both in IR and political science, European feminist scholars—particularly in the German-speaking context—aim at adding an analytical dimension to the notion of governance. As Birgit Sauer, a German political theorist, points out, the intention is to develop a “theory of governance [that is] grounded in a state theoretical approach” (Sauer 2011: 456). The state is here not regarded “as an independent actor, as a neutral arbiter, independent from social (power) relations” (ibid.), but rather as a constitutive element of governance. As will be elaborated further below, feminist analyses particularly in the German-speaking context go beyond constructivist feminist engagements with global governance and aim at decentering political authority rather from neo-Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives on the state.

Reflections

Thinking about a feminist way of theorizing global governance specific to scholars situated in Europe might seem to be at odds with current developments within feminist IR, which increasingly seeks to decolonize knowledge production in IR (Runyan 2018; Medie and Kang 2018). Indeed, the broader trend within the subdiscipline goes into the direction of acknowledging non-Western writings that go beyond Eurocentric conceptualizations of IR (see e.g. Smith and Tickner 2020). Focusing on feminist IR in Europe does reinforce this kind of ‘centrism’ and draws boundaries of what can be known “marking who asks what questions and how answers are sought” (Peterson 1992: 183). However, as Peterson (ibid.) emphasizes, “boundaries are historical: they are imposed as contingent practices, not discovered as transcend ‘givens.’ As social constructions, they can be deconstructed, disrupted and transgressed” (ibid.). Accordingly, as this chapter contends, there is no such thing as one “European” feminist IR; rather, knowledge production in feminist IR is situated in locally specific traditions of political thought. Accounting for different places, spaces and sites of knowledge production within Europe helps, on the one hand, to discern epistemic hierarchies (e.g. in terms of publications practices and citation patterns), and provides, on the other hand, a deeper grasp of why certain topics or theoretical perspectives unfold in specific contexts, but not in others. A close reading of the feminist global governance literature in Europe has revealed that writings from a German-speaking context play a distinctive role, when it comes to explaining the gendered structures and outcomes of global governance.

German-speaking scholars engage in each of the above-mentioned strands of the literature, yet make the most unique contributions particularly in the fields of the IPE-centered and institution-centered literature. A key characteristic of this scholarship is their feminist materialist and discourse theoretical orientation which can be explained by their academic training and the scholarly debates on state theory they were involved in throughout their academic career. Most of these scholars were trained in institutions, that are known for their Marxist tradition and their focus at materialist state theory—e.g. the Faculty of Social Science at Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main (e.g. Stefanie Wöhl, Daniela Tepe-Belfrage), and the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science at Freie Universität Berlin (e.g. Birgit Sauer, Susanne Schultz). Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, these institutions were center stage of intensive scholarly debates about the form and function of the capitalist state (so-called Staatsableitungsdebatte, “state derivation debate”) and the role of the state in social reproduction of the capitalist mode of production (see further on the evolution of the debate Jessop 1982; Tepe 2012). Major contentions revolved around the question of whether the state apparatus can be regarded as a manifestation of class relations within a certain capitalist mode of production. Scholars of (feminist) materialist state theory criticize the economic determinism of (strictly) Marxist approaches (see for an extensive discussion Jessop 1982) and warn against regarding the state as a mere “instrument of the ruling class” (Ludwig and Sauer 2010: 177, own translation), without adequately considering gendered power relations, racism, and the complexity of societal struggles. Likewise, scholars drawing on the writings of Nicos Poulantzas also criticized the economic determinism of Marxist approaches and pushed toward conceptualizing the state “as the institutional and material condensation of social forces” (Wöhl 2014: 89). With the notion of social forces, Poulantzas points to the differing interests and struggles that materialize in state institutions; thus, the state is regarded as “an arena” (ibid.) through which these struggles and relations of dominance are mediated and consent—in a neo-Gramscian sense—is organized. It is exactly this perspective—a combination of Poulantzian and neo-Gramscian approaches—that opens theoretical links to Foucauldian thought, and the concept of governementality (most prominently developed by the feminist political theorist Gundula Ludwig 2010): The state is not regarded as the center of power of the ruling class, but rather as a capillary set of institutional terrains, procedures and practices that shape the “mentalité” of agents through which consent, and thus, hegemony is organized. Interests are universalized by influencing ideas, norms, attitudes and by discipline and (re)producing gendered subjectivities (see Ludwig 2011; Ludwig and Sauer 2010). Of course, this summary does not come close to reflect the depth and breadth of the debate. Yet, the intention here is to indicate that materialist state theory was fruitfully taken further from Foucauldian and feminist perspectives.

This tradition of political thought shaped ‘critical’ approaches to IPE and had a significant influence on the wider feminist IPE scholarship that critically interrogates the neoliberal character of global governance. It is no coincidence that feminist scholarships from the German-speaking context connects well with feminist writings within the British school of IPE, that also heavily draws on neo-Marxist, neo-Gramscian and, partly, on governmentality studies (e.g. Steans and Tepe 2008; Bedford and Rai 2010; Waylen 2004). Though, some feminist scholars explicitly refer to materialist state theory, whereas others exclusively apply the concept of governmentality in the study of global governance.

Theorizing the State in Global Governance

As Shirin Rai states, “[f]eminist approaches to global governance institutions have developed largely through analyses of political engagements at the level of the state […]” (2004: 586). She highlights two (interconnected) areas of contention within this debate: One is concerned with the state’s capacity in meaningfully promoting gender equality, and the feminist hopes attached to the global level to bring about change; and the other is on the question of whether a shift from state-centered government to governance pushes or limits democratization and women’s political participation at local, national, and international levels. Rai takes a rather critical stance arguing, that it is important to “take into account the disciplinary power of dominant social relations within which [state] institutions are embedded” (ibid.: 592). This perspective brings at fore the effects of “disciplinary neoliberalism” (ibid.) in global governance—that is, for instance, the hegemonic co-optation of feminist movements. Conceptualizing the internationalized state as a global “field of social relations and power, where social forces fight over, meaning, representation and interests” (Sauer and Wöhl 2011: 111) allows for a more critical analysis of transnational feminist organizing, as civil society actors are not grasped as simply “located opposite (gegenüber) the state” (Tepe 2012: 5) and as innocent agents of change, but as an integral part of gendered statehood (ibid.; Wöhl 2014; Schultz 2006).

Susanne Schultz (2006), for instance, probes the ways in which women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) mobilize and strategize in the arena of international population and family planning policies. Her aim is to explain, why an anti-natalist bias was able to unfold during and in the aftermath of the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo (1994), despite of strong transnational feminist advocacy for an emancipatory understanding of reproductive rights. Drawing on a neo-Gramscian approach and on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, Schultz develops a nuanced analytics of power in global governance. She analyzes the contradictory dynamics among transnational women’s NGOs and detects the discursive mechanisms through which these actors were co-opted. As she shows, one of the reasons was the medicalization discourse, that defined the boundaries (risk technologies) within which agents’ subjectivities were shaped and consent to the anti-natalist position was reached.

The feminist IPE-scholars Stefanie Wöhl (2008) and Kate Bedford (2007, 2008) also refer to the concept of governmentality for conceptualizing global governance and the role of both international and supranational organizations. Wöhl focuses on a specific mode of governance at EU level—that is the open method of coordination (OMC)—and interrogates how OMC “steers institutional reforms and policies” (Wöhl 2008: 75) and, thus, “governs at a distance” (Rose 2004: 49). This method is meant to compare member states in terms of their achievements in the field of gender equality and employment policy and to assess the extent to which women’s employability has been promoted in the member states. That means, in the words of Wöhl: “OMC is designed to encourage the member states to compete with one another by using political benchmarking” (ibid.: 72). In her study, Wöhl elucidates the disciplinary effects of this mode of governance. She conceptualizes the strategies of open method of coordination and benchmarking as embodied disciplinary techniques and shows how actors’ sense of self (both at the national level and the local level) is shaped and how they, as a result, come to accept market-oriented and activating labor market policies (Wöhl 2011: 32). Likewise, Kate Bedford (2007, 2008) probes the ways in which the World Bank “governs intimacy” at a distance. She deciphers the “common-sense nature, or normativity, of discourses” (2008: 85) about sexuality and social reproduction in World Bank projects and shows how these projects shape the subjectivities of agents at household level. She starts with illustrating that the World Bank is a learning institution—insofar as it underwent a “mission-shift” (ibid.: 86) trying to solve the problem of women’s double burden from productive and reproductive labor (“social reproduction dilemma”). She delves into the implementation of World Bank projects (e.g. in Ecuador) and uncovers normative heterosexuality and common-sense assumptions about masculinity that underly the idea of a “caring couplehood […] as a solution to the social reproduction dilemma” (ibid.: 94).

Knowledge and Expertise as Technologies of Power

Another strand of literature in feminist IR in Europe, that predominantly draws on Foucauldian thought, deals with the role of feminist knowledge and expertise in international and supranational organizations. In fact, as Kate Bedford (2008) states, “the deployment of expertise is a key mechanism of governance” (ibid.: 84). As feminist IR scholars elucidate, expert knowledge was throughout the decades an important element of gender equality politics in global governance (Çağlar et al. 2013); yet, the need for gender experts and their expert knowledge has become “even more urgent” (Hubert and Stratigaki 2011: 173) with the adoption of gender mainstreaming in 1995. This scholarship is mainly concerned with identifying the different forms of the knowledge that circulate at international level, with qualifying their transformative potential and depicting the interpretative struggles and the politics of meaning making in international organizations.

Most studies concerned with the role of expert knowledge focus at gender mainstreaming in international organizations. In fact, gender mainstreaming is an all-encompassing, complex, and technocratic approach that aims at institutionalizing gender equality in all policies, programs, and activities. The implementation of gender mainstreaming requires specialized gender expertise in different policy areas, such as agriculture (UNFAO), trade (UNCTAD, WTO), or finance (IMF, World Bank). That means, experts need strong disciplinary analytical skills for understanding both policy problems in different policy fields (i.e. high inflation rates in the field of economic and fiscal policy coordination) and the gendered dimension of exactly these policy problems. As Çağlar (2010, 2013a) in her study elucidates, gender experts provide knowledge about cause-effect relations—that is about the ways in which gender asymmetries in the division of labor and in the distribution of resources (natural, financial, infrastructural, and educational) affect a specific field of action and vice versa the ways in which policies in a specific field reproduce, deepen, or change these gender asymmetries. Thus, gender experts interpret and translate their knowledge on gender differences and power relations in a way that it makes sense within a specific policy field (see also Elomäki 2020 for the context of the EU).

Moreover, as studies show, experts need to be knowledgeable about institutional structures, rules, and procedures in order to be able to strategically act and meaningfully implement gender mainstreaming (e.g. Carmel 2017; Seibicke 2020). This is not trivial, as the complexity of regulatory and procedural rules of policy-making in global governance requires an insider knowledge—what is coined as procedural knowledge in the feminist literature (Woodward 2004; Seibicke 2020)—that can just be acquired through participation at different levels of international policy-making. This shows that expert knowledge is more than simply having knowledge about; it encompasses also the ability to interpret, translate, and strategically utilize that knowledge within policy fields and complex institutional configurations. Thus, expert knowledge is a form of ‘knowing’ by participating and interacting in an institutional context. As Nico Stehr (2001) contends, “[k]nowing is a historical relation to things and facts, but also to rules, laws and programs. Some sort of participation is therefore constitutive for knowing: knowing things, rules, programs, facts, is ‘appropriating’ them in some sense, including them into [the] field of orientation and competence” (ibid.: 33). Feminist scholarship has provided a wealth of insights on the successes of feminist actors in ‘appropriating’ international institutions and infusing their expert knowledge and feminist objectives very strategically into the organizational structures of these institutions. However, these studies also show that feminists’ expert knowledge got ‘appropriated’ by these institutions and their technocracy. As feminist scholarship in IR aptly shows, feminist expert knowledge is subjected to the managerial and technocratic logics of international organizations and horizontal modes of governance (Kunz and Prügl 2019; Beier and Çağlar 2020). It is the “measurement imperative” (Liebowitz and Zwingel 2014: 363) and its “inherent logics of simplification and comparability” (ibid.) that decisively determines the kind of evidence that becomes relevant, gets included into the “field of orientation and competence” (Stehr 2001: 33), and guides the creation of gender equality policies in international organizations. Thus, the question arises of what remains “feminist” once feminists’ expert knowledge hits the ground of organizations’ technocracy.

This question is approached by feminist IR scholars in Europe by drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge-nexus and the notion of technologies of power. Çağlar (2010, 2013a), for instance, deals with gender mainstreaming strategies in the field of global economic governance and scrutinizes how the field of action, that is often entitled as “engendering macroeconomic policymaking,” was discursively produced (ibid.: 66). She shows that the emergence of gender mainstreaming in global economic governance is closely connected to the field of knowledge in feminist economics. Çağlar illustrates that different meanings are attached to the phrase “engendering macroeconomic policymaking,” “depending on how gender is situated in relation to social and economic phenomena and depending on how the boundary between social and economic policy problems is drawn” (ibid.: 67).

For the field of agriculture, Mukhopadhyay and Prügl (2019) examine the role of gender expertise and probe “the ways this expertise is deployed through material and social technologies” (ibid.: 704). Combining Foucauldian and new-materialist feminist approaches, they conceptualize gender expertise as a “performative apparatus” (ibid.: 705) that are implicated to construct gender in a dichotomous and heteronormative way. Expertise, drawing on household surveys or gender-disaggregated data, respectively, as an essential source of ‘evidence-based’ policy-making translates into instruments to measure and guide performance in ways that (re)inscribes stereotypical assumptions about gender and gender relations. The performativity of expertise is also at the center of the study conducted by Kunz et al. (2019). They scrutinize the practices of gender experts in international governance and, thus, discuss “what gender experts are, how they work and what is considered as expert knowledge” (ibid.: 26). They grasp gender expertise as a contested transnational field (in a Bourdieusian sense) and show how gender experts are engaged in practices of boundary drawing by constantly negotiating, firstly, the differences between gender expertise and feminist politics, secondly, the contours of authoritative knowledge and thirdly, the coloniality of international politics and expertise. In contrast to feminist IR scholars, who argue that gender expertise gets depoliticized once hitting the ground of international organizations, Kunz et al. convincingly show, that “gender expertise is not just technical knowledge, but intensely political; and […] that feminisms cannot be reduced to movement activism, but live inside expertise and are part of the contestations within this transnational field” (ibid.: 36).

Conclusion

To conclude, feminist IR scholars in Europe have made unique contributions to the study of global governance. As shown, this scholarship is dedicated to move beyond a descriptive notion of global governance and to develop a theoretical concept of global governance that helps to explain the gendered “structures and practices of power” (Sauer 2012: 456) in international politics. As the discussion of literature above shows, the specifically neo-Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to the study of global governance reveals an ambivalent picture of gender politics in global governance. These studies go beyond depicting feminist actors and gender equality policies as either being successful or as being impeded by structural factors that are external to them (i.e. patriarchy, capitalism). Rather, they uncover the (literally) embodied disciplinary techniques and show how these actors become part of neoliberal governance.